After spending many hours rehashing the good and evil in the Dodd-Frank Act, the House Financial Services Committee took the first step Thursday toward a replacement, the Financial CHOICE Act, that would head toward an almost certain Senate roadblock.

The CHOICE Act is the two-year pet project of Texas Republican Jeb Hensarling, the committee chair. It passed on a party line vote and is certain to pass in the full House as well.

But from there it will be sent on its way to a quiet death in the Senate. The chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Idaho Republican Mike Crapo, would rather change Dodd-Frank with a bipartisan pair of tweezers than with Hensarling’s chainsaw.

The House committee spent hours debating individual amendments that never had a chance to be added to a bill that was destined never to become law.

During the debate, two issues took the lion’s share of the time.

Democrats contended that Republicans wanted to harm consumers by stripping away the powers of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while the Republicans charged that Democrats were harming small banks with Dodd-Frank’s compliance overkill.

Buried in the nearly 600-page bill are several items thwarting SEC enforcement that Democrats tried to delete. One basically ends SEC administrative judge enforcement proceedings because it gives all defendants the right to go to court.

Since court proceedings are exceedingly more costly for the resource-limited regulator, nearly all those charged with offenses would be expected to go that route in the expectation the SEC would be more likely to give up the effort to sanction them.

Another provision in the CHOICE Act that could weaken the agency’s efforts to go after alleged wrongdoers creates an SEC enforcement ombudsman to act as a liaison between the regulator and any person subject to an investigation.

The SEC must give adequate notice of a rule before trying to impose a sanction.

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